Self help

Here’s a handful of highlights from Jazz Week. For complete listings, go to www.jazzboston.org.

BENEFIT FOR NEW ORLEANS HABITAT FOR HUMANITY MUSICIANS’ VILLAGE | Berklee Performance Center, 136 Mass Ave, Boston | April 21 at 8 pm | Max Weinberg, Phil Wilson and the Rainbow Band, Henri Smith & Nat Simpkins, Your Neighborhood Saxophone Quartet.

THE MAKANDA PROJECT | Newton South High School, 140 Brandeis Road, Newton Center | April 21 at 8 pm | A tribute to one of Boston’s greats, Makanda Ken McIntyre, with John Kordalewski, Salim Washington, Charlie Kohlhase, Kurtis Rivers, Sean Berry, Josiah Woodson, Robert Stringer, John Lockwood, and Yoron Israel.

TRIBUTE TO JIMMY GIUFFRE | Rutman’s Violins, 11 Westland Ave, Boston | April 24 at 7:30 pm | Saxophonist Allan Chase, guitarist John Damian, and bassist Bob Nieske play the music of the pathbreaking saxophonist/composer and long-time New England Conservatory professor.

CREATIVE NATION CONCERT SERIES | Lily Pad, 1353 Cambridge St, Cambridge | April 25 at 7 pm | The first of three nights organized by the exciting guitarist Eric Hofbauer and his Creative Nation label finds him playing solo guitar; that’s followed by a set with his trio, Industrious Noise.

“PERSPECTIVES ON JAZZ: JAZZ WEEK, THEN & NOW” | Boston Public Library, Copley Place, Boston | April 27 at noon | With Arni Cheatham, Ron Gill, Mark Harvey, Marianne Solivan, and Bob Young.

•   GETTING THE STORY  |  December 01, 2009
  Full-length written histories of jazz can be a slog. Especially since "the story of jazz" (as critic Marshall Stearns titled his 1956 tome) only gets longer and more complicated. Personally, on these prose-narrative trips along the New Orleans–New York axis of musical development, I usually bog down somewhere outside Chicago.
•   MISS TESS | DARLING, OH DARLING  |  December 02, 2009
  Boston singer-songwriter Miss Tess has always had the pipes and the taste to carry off her various ventures into country, blues, and multi-hued swing, but Darling, Oh Darling underlines her overall sound.
•   ERIK DEUTSCH | HUSH MONEY  |  November 25, 2009
  Having played in projects from jam bands to jazz and as a singer-songwriter accompanist, keyboardist Erik Deutsch led an acoustic jazz album for his debut.
•   MIXED MEDIA  |  November 18, 2009
  Film noir has been a running theme in composer/pianist Ran Blake's work since the beginning of his career — his very first album, The Newest Sound Around (RCA, 1962), with singer Jeanne Lee, began with David Raskin's theme to Otto Preminger's Laura .
•   LIVE AND ON RECORD  |  November 04, 2009
  To call Darius Jones’s music avant-garde seems almost beside the point. In its way, it’s older than old — it’s ancient.